Vernacular Harmony

As a Chilean-born composer and pianist living in Australia, I have nurtured a penchant for bringing Latin American vernacular music into the classical concert hall. Both of these musical traditions are widespread and possess an immense canon fashioned by many an inspired composer. Just as significant, both have been greatly impacted by a myriad of interactions with vernacular music over several centuries. A brief survey of the Western tradition may identify composers such as Mozart and Beethoven engaging with Turkish music, Bartók with Eastern European folk music, or Bizet and Debussy with Spain.

BACK BEFORE BACH, the latest Navona Records release from the Philadelphia-based ‘Renaissance band’ Piffaro, is an exceptional compendium of sixteenth and early seventeenth century German and Franco-Flemish music. As the album’s title suggests, the group of composers Piffaro features can be seen as the precedent for the luminaries of the German baroque era, specifically Johann Sebastian Bach. With BACK BEFORE BACH simultaneously drawing from a wide variety of genres, yet also focusing on a geographically and temporally limited group of composers, Piffaro succeeds wildly in presenting the musical foundation from which Bach and his contemporaries emerged.

Carla Bozulich - Boy (2014) {Constellation CS1102-2}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 256 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 100 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 26 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2014 Constellation | CS1102-2
Rock / Alternative Rock / Experimental Rock

Carla Bozulich states in the liner notes that Boy is her "pop" album. She knows the term is subjective. In her definition, the word reflects the multiple locations she wrote and recorded in, the numerous people encountered in her nomadic state of travel, and the various musical genres that can be – and often are – used to create pop. Bozulich doesn't "deconstruct" here. She uses vernacular song forms in an organic process of elocution and expression that makes something else of them while never quite emptying them of form or function. Instead, she finds the cracks that open them, and makes them bleed into others, ordered by an instinctive sense of aesthetic transgression that becomes creation. Boy was primarily written, produced, and played by Bozulich and John Eichenseer.

One of the most striking and strangely moving moments onJake Xerxes Fussell’s gorgeous Good and Green Again—an album, his fourth and most recent, replete with such dazzling moments—arrives at its very end, with the brief words to the final song “Washing-ton.” “General Washington/Noblest of men/His house, his horse, his cherry tree, and him,” Fussell sings, after a hushed introductory passage in which his trademark percussively fingerpicked Telecaster converses lacily with James Elkington’s parlor piano. That’s the entire lyrical content of the song, which proceeds to float away on orchestral clouds of French horn, trumpet, and strings, until it simply stops, suddenly evaporating, vanishing with no fade or trace, no resolution to its sorrowful minor-key chord progression, just silence and stillness and stark presidential absence. It feels like the end of a film, or the cold departure of a ghost, and is unlike anything else Jake has recorded.

The original Who's Better, Who's Best: The Videos was a handy laserdisc consisting of 17 videos, an inordinate number of them overlapping at least in part with material from the movie The Kids Are Alright – which was OK, as the latter was never widely available as a laserdisc…